Europe vs. China, LoL Worlds 2018 – Who will emerge victorious?

Fnatic and Invictus will be going head to head in the finals of the 2018 League of Legends World Championships. The winner’s prize pool will likely be lower than the previous years. This is mainly due to Riot’s emphasis on splitting a sizable portion of crowd funding intended for the World Championship, to be equally shared between the teams.

Both Fnatic and Invictus Gaming were able to strongly clean sweep their opponents in the semifinals. Last week, first we saw Invictus Gaming going 3-0 against G2 Esports, then, on the following day, Fnatic completely dominated Cloud 9, 3-0.

© LoL Esports

Judging by Invictus’s undisputed performance over G2 Esports in the semi-finals, it is unlikely that Fnatic will gain the upper hand against the Chinese team. Fnatic and G2 Esports have consistently been two of the strongest teams in Europe’s competitive League of Legends scene. While Fnatic have proved themselves to be stronger than G2 Esports this year, the difference is nothing extremely major.

That said, this is by far the closest any EU team has ever made to a World Championship title; excluding season one of course where Asia’s competitive League of Legends scene virtually did not exist. Considering G2 Esports were eliminated, the hopes of both EU and NA have been placed solely on Fnatic. Note that from season two onwards there has not been a western team who have made it to the finals of a Worlds Championship until now.

This year’s world championships has been without a doubt the most unpredictable Worlds, or major tournament ever. No one predicted the downfall of the Koreans, who were recognised as the overlords of competitive League of Legends. On the contrary, two EU teams and one NA team appeared in the semi-finals, a worthy moment to remember for the history of LoL esports.